The first official details for Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed 2 were released after several people managed to get an early copy of the upcoming issue of Game Informer. As confirmed by Gamer Informer, Assassin's Creed 2 will be the cover story for the May edition of the magazine. Some of the features to be included in Assassin's Creed 2 are as follows:

New weapons to choose from including an axe, hammer, mace, spear, two different sword types, spear axe, and two smaller blades
The ability to swim
Leanardo Da Vinci's workshop and flying machine
Locations such as Saint Marks Basilica, The Grand Canal, The Little Canal, Tuscany, and the Rialto bridge
The game will open in 1476
You will play as Ezio Auditore de Firenze, a nobleman of Florence who is a descendant of Altair
People such as Machiavelli, Caterina Sofrza, and Lorenzo de Medici
New notoriety system
Each weapon has a special move
New way of disarming enemies by using their own weapons against them
Sixteen unique mission types
No pick pocketing missions
You will be able to see a street-side doctor when injured
Hidden objects
New opponents including archers, elite enemies, dagger wielders, armored troops and an intelligent halberd enemy
The ability to assassinate people while hiding in a hay bale
The Lorendo de Medici assassination attempt
A day and night sequence

In addition to the details mentioned above, screenshots of some of the gameplay were scanned from the upcoming Game Informer issue.

__________________I gots one of them high powered gaming computers with an EVGA GTX 480 video thingy and a Q9550 processing device and also one of them Windows 7 64 operating programs with 4GB of some Corsair 1033 DDR2 ram.

That's what bugged me about the first game. You're this kick-ass assassin, yet you can't even tread in waist-high water.

In all fairness, I wonder how many people in that era in that location learned how to swim. Still, I agree.

If you read the entire Game Informer article (which I linked to in the other thread ) it sounds like they paid a lot of attention to the complaints on the first game and sought to fix them all. The gameplay is misson structured like GTA, rather than the open investigations, which I kind of think I might miss, but... sounds good anyway.

As long as the game immerses you in 15th century Italy I am a happy man. The main reason the first game is one of my absolute favorites is because of its incredible immersion.

__________________I gots one of them high powered gaming computers with an EVGA GTX 480 video thingy and a Q9550 processing device and also one of them Windows 7 64 operating programs with 4GB of some Corsair 1033 DDR2 ram.

Looks good... hopefully it won't be extremely repetitive, glad the "uber assassin" can actually swim now... almost as bad as in the early Splinter Cell games where Sam Fisher couldn't swim... disgusting.

Also I do love how everybody is so extremely excited about being able to swim... something that should have been present in the first game. But I can't say anything bad... because that is a good feature to have in a sequel.